I thought Yoshi wants healer to focus on healing only..

[FoxyAreku]

Said it before, I'll say it again. Being a healer is not the same as being a pacifist. Your objective is to reduce the boss' HP to zero. Do what it takes to reach that goal or be called out as useless.

[Melichoir]

For starters: The 'pure healing' thing is a misunderstanding from how the Japanese market views healing vs western markets. If I understood it correctly, we see pure healing as "Healers who only heal and nothing else" vs them who rely on shield/regen type healing as the healing model (and not so much direct healing, unclear on this aspect). Point is, when they said they were focusing on pure healing, its not that they said "Healers need to be only healing and nothing else." it was more of their way of describing how they want healers to handle broadly but that wasnt taken as such. Go figure.

This got more conflated when it was revealed that SCH kit was gonna be tuned down DPS wise. People made the incorrect assumption that all this means is they dont wnat healers to heal. This is a bad read as the reason SCH got pruned was because it was so much more different due to its vast amount of DPS skills on hand. As a point, WHM got a DPS spell out of balancing (and their DPS is actually the highest atm among healers).

As far as doing dps as a healer, you should be, but it should not be your focus. You should not be spending 80% of your time dpsing as a healer in a fight that is current. You should be doing healing and mitigating and when possible throw in DPS skills. The idea is finding a balance between the two where you keep the party up and where youre putting out decent dps. Mind you that you dont have to have a party topped off unless its a raid buster, but you also shouldnt be so focused on spamming Broil or something that you let people's HP drop to 20% consistently just so you can get that purple parser score. With the amount of healing your supposed to be doing, big complex dps kits on healers was foolish.

[Typhoria]

There are several things that currently exist that go against the "focused on healing" mindset.

1) Healing is too strong compared to the unavoidable damage. This is compounded further with how many powerful oGCD utilities and heals healers get that cost no MP.

2) MP constraints for healing is mostly inexistent. Only 3 things really tax a healer's MP. Rezzing, spamming AoE damage and spamming powerful healing spells.
The Rez cost is reduced by SMN/RDM and when people learn mechanics. After too many rezzes, the group wipes anyways due to insufficient DPS. Spamming powerful heals is typically only used in dungeon wall-to-wall pulls when the Tank isn't using cooldowns or the DPS is lacking and the Tank is out of cooldowns.

3) Healers can't "fix" problems caused by failing mechanics. If someone gets too many vulnerability stacks, they die. This takes us back to the 2nd point where the group wipes from a lack of DPS after rezzing.

On a separate note, why does weakness still exist after rezzing? Over a minute and a half of 25% reduced main stat, after already taxing Rez MP and the load/respawn animation that effectively disables the player for 5+ sec. It makes more sense when the healer's MP serves as the "enrage" timer, but for hard enrage timers it's almost better to just reset.

[Hammerhorn]

As long as there are enrage timers healers can never “just” focus on healing sorry not this game at end game raid content.

[Melichoir]

On a separate note, why does weakness still exist after rezzing? Over a minute and a half of 25% reduced main stat, after already taxing Rez MP and the load/respawn animation that effectively disables the player for 5+ sec. It makes more sense when the healer's MP serves as the "enrage" timer, but for hard enrage timers it's almost better to just reset.

Because they want you to make sure the optimal strategy isnt die to a mechanic. For example, if there was a single hit stack marker, without res sickness the optimal strat would be have that person stand away from the group and die rather than stack the group and deal with healing. Yes, there is the MP burden and Res time, but that is not as detrimental as you think it is. Even in current savage tier, people can die and still clear the fights. It's harder and not ideal, but savage isnt so punishing that 1 death = guaranteed wipe to enrage.

[Kaethra]

I thought Yoshi wants healer to focus on healing only..

Yoshi doesn't get to decide how players play. He doesn't get to decide how players structure their groups.

Its not up to him. We took that choice for ourselves.

[Aeducan]

“Lots of ways to help people. Sometimes heal patients; sometimes execute dangerous people. Either way helps.” - Mordin Solus

If the battle requires you to constantly heal full-time to keep everyone up, then by all means do that. From experience though, usually this scenario only happens when the group is not doing well and DPSing would be the furthest thing on my mind because there's always someone to take care of. If the group is doing fine, what's stopping you from DPSing? Healing is scripted in this game and as long as tank manages their CD and everyone do the required mechanics, chances are you'll get decent amount of downtime.

[HyoMinPark]

I took a break just after first coil release, I don’t notice such situations, probably because we all just running first coil with dark light set and first stage of relic, no one is vastly overgear, hence I have little down time to pull a aero and may be 1-2 stone before I have back to casting heal. Then I came back as HW release, there are some intense fight like the Vault pair with my low potency AST, those are quite intense healing. Time fly ppl have been quite over gear and AST was buff to the sky. Try A1S, don’t even have to do mechanics, just dps the boss down ASAP, and I barely need to cast any heal, just spam my only single target dps.
I mean it wouldn’t hurt if we push the healing requirements more this expansion, a small tune down of healing potency or rise in oGCD healing CD would be able to tip the balance slightly.

Well, of course, AST healing got easier after they were buffed. AST could barely function as a healer at 3.0 release, so things were, expectedly, more challenging for it because it was quite literally gimped. And, of course, you don't have to do mechanics for A1S after you start overgearing it. However, I think you're being a bit disingenuous bringing that up, because this didn't start happening until after the content was already irrelevant. When A1S was relevant, it was overturned to the point that Faust was a static breaker. When people were doing it for the Anima step, it was already irrelevant due to overgearing it by ~60 item levels and due to Gordias being nerfed as a whole.

[Crushnight]

Well, of course, AST healing got easier after they were buffed. AST could barely function as a healer at 3.0 release, so things were, expectedly, more challenging for it because it was quite literally gimped. And, of course, you don't have to do mechanics for A1S after you start overgearing it. However, I think you're being a bit disingenuous bringing that up, because this didn't start happening until after the content was already irrelevant. When A1S was relevant, it was overturned to the point that Faust was a static breaker. When people were doing it for the Anima step, it was already irrelevant due to overgearing it by ~60 item levels and due to Gordias being nerfed as a whole.

Man i remember when my static killed Faust for the 1st time so much cheering for trash XD (took 1hr 30 mins).

Yea this game will always ask for your healer dps can't get to ShB without them :P group content well tan my hide when i see trusts do more than you, I would then start to think you are just too lazy and if i'm feeling grumpy mr booty will come to play.

[Misutoraru]

Well, of course, AST healing got easier after they were buffed. AST could barely function as a healer at 3.0 release, so things were, expectedly, more challenging for it because it was quite literally gimped. And, of course, you don't have to do mechanics for A1S after you start overgearing it. However, I think you're being a bit disingenuous bringing that up, because this didn't start happening until after the content was already irrelevant. When A1S was relevant, it was overturned to the point that Faust was a static breaker. When people were doing it for the Anima step, it was already irrelevant due to overgearing it by ~60 item levels and due to Gordias being nerfed as a whole.

it is more the time i took break (before Alexander normal release) and the time i return (ppl were already farming Midas savage)
I dont really care if healer DPS become mandatory or not, I just hope we could see some more heal intense fight, cleric stance might not be a good design but I love that concept, switching between heal and dps and if we do it at the wrong time we got punish